Engines of the future: What's next in internet search?

Back in 1990, before the web was born, Alan Emtage and his colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, designed a program to index software stored on the embryonic internet. Archie, as Emtage named his program, was the first internet search engine.

Twenty years on and we call up a Google, Yahoo or Bing some 500,000 times every second. They bring us the juiciest gossip, the best gifts and bargain holidays, and form the cornerstones of an economy worth trillions of dollars. It is hard to imagine a world, real or virtual, without them.

To mark Archie’s 20th birthday, New Scientist examines the wonders and woes of web search and asks whether it could work even better